Well in case you hadn't noticed Mozilla (with much fanfare) relaunched Firefox as a 'NEW' browser called Quantum in mid November, they even ran TV ads.Therefore, as Mozilla obviously know, the only interesting numbers are for the last 10 weeks......Oh, and how much the Verizon lawsuit's going to cost them in legal fees

Nothing terrible (mind you, I don't have to use it looking or functioning as it does by default) but equally, nothing that impressive either.

You can see something is pretty wrong though when I can compare Quantum to some random small browser no one has every heard of (Midori) and find neither standing head and shoulders over each other. A top browser should be wiping the floor with the competition and that should be apparent from the moment you open it.

Frenzie wrote:Seems somewhat random in this topic?

Don't worry about it. My threads have always had a very loose definition of what the topic actually is.

Talking of which....

Why does Scarlett Johansson get bigger and better parts than Rachel Weisz? I'm going to take a shot in the dark here and guess that it has nothing to do with her acting ability. Now, I could drift off and talk about Turner's 'The Fighting Temeraire', but you get the general point - whether geeks like it or not, appearances matter and what we see matters to us.

This is also true of the UI of a browser program. People often claim that Firefox is a mere clone of Chrome and both have the same ability to add background skins (incorrectly called 'themes') to them. But, you know, this is dreadfully unfair....to Chrome.

The Chrome themes are far better. In this example I'm going to take a child's theme as an example, simply because theme writers know they can really let rip with those, instead of having to be far more restrained when doing, say, a theme for the workplace or something.

Leaving aside the obvious point that the Chrome themes are bundled with a suitable New Tab 'wallpaper', you can see (well, I can) that the guy knows that they only have 2 toolbars to play with or maybe 3 on a good day and is making the most of them and is picking up exactly the right shade off the wallpaper to start the right/left gradient on the Tab/Title Bar. The active tab, Nav and Bookmarks Bar then pick up a top/bottom gradient with an effective texture effect on the latter two. If I was to be picky (I am) then the unhovered inactive tab is too grey and should lean on the green more. However, all in all, that is a good piece of work in a tight space, where you have no theming control over toolbar buttons or urlbar.

Now look a the Firefox efforts - meaningless slabs of 3000 x 200px of hurriedly copied artwork that not only have no relationship at all to the UI, but seem oblivious to the fact that people stopped using 4 toolbars on browsers back in 2008 and that using 4 toolbars is the only way to ever see what those previews are showing there.

Mozilla has endless telemetry streaming to them that should be telling them that, but just looking at user's screenshots on the Net or listening to them trying to save UI 'real estate' would be just as telling. But, no one thought to tell those skin guys, so they keep banging out stuff that show people with half their heads cut off for most of the users out there.

So, no, certainly as regards the present day 'customisation' of the UI, Firefox is no Chrome clone.

Metal Lion latest SeaMonkey & Thunderbird Themes - Sea Monkey and Silver Sea Monkey"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke (attrib.)

tomatoshadow2 wrote:@Frank Lion, so can we ever get themes in Firefox to this level Frank?

At a technical level, it would be very simple. However, users seem to be less demanding than they once were and seem content enough with what they're given. So, it's unlikely it will change.

It's odd to be living through what seems to be one gigantic social experiment before our eyes. Certainly, even 10 years ago on the Net, users were sharp, inquisitive, knowledgeable and demanding. Fast forward to now and despite a doubling of Net users and a huge baseless rise of 'entitlement', users now do indeed seem quite happy to lap up whatever the big companies deign to give them.

I think we all knew years back that the Net would change people's lives, but I don't think really dumbed down and shallow was quite what we had in mind! All human history replaced by nothing more than 'Did I remember to pack my selfie stick?'

Most odd.

Metal Lion latest SeaMonkey & Thunderbird Themes - Sea Monkey and Silver Sea Monkey"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke (attrib.)

Frank Lion wrote: Fast forward to now and despite a doubling of Net users and a huge baseless rise of 'entitlement', users now do indeed seem quite happy to lap up whatever the big companies deign to give them.

This is more like the whole civilization and not just internet browsers.